|summary=Historian [[:Category:John Julius Norwich|John Julius Norwich]] (or Rt Hon/Viscount John Julius Norwich, to give him his full title) doesn't write the sort of history books one associates with school days. He doesn't do dry and dusty. In fact ''The Popes: A History'' isn't ''just'' a history book but a romp through the ages with some great trivia nuggets scattered throughout the informative gold.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099565870</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Emma Smith
|title=The Cambridge Shakespeare Guide
|rating=5
|genre=Home and Family
|summary=Does the world need another guide to Shakespeare's plays? There are plenty about and students these days have the added resource of the Internet to get the basics. However, if it does, then this is as good as any you will find. It's nicely written and beautifully clear and above all, succinct. In fact I'm doing a disservice to Emma Smith already by terming it a guide to his plays, because she also includes the poems and sonnets.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>052114972X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Ackroyd
|title=London Under
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=Peter Ackroyd is already well-known as a historian of London. As a kind of adjunct to his mammoth work on the city, here we have a comparatively slender tome on one specific aspect. Underneath the city is a world of its own, of springs, streams, Roman amphitheatres, Victorian sewers, gang hideouts, the creatures which have dwelt in its darkness from rats and eels to monsters and hosts, and last but not least the modern Underground railway system.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099287374</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Ackroyd
|title=London: The Concise Biography
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=As is the case with his recent volume on Charles Dickens, Ackroyd's London is an abridged version of the full book originally published twelve years ago. Nevertheless, at over 600 pages of fairly close print in paperback, it is still a very full read.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099570386</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Stafford
|title=Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943 - 1945
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=The work of the secret services is always going to be shady, dark and murky. Books like David Stafford's Mission Accomplished: SOE and Italy 1943 - 1945 make an effort to shine a light on the shadows and bring the facts into view. Stafford's admirably honest introduction claims that he has 'done [his] best to ensure that what appears here is accurate and truthful', but reminds his reader that 'history is indeed intrinsically messy'; even more so when his sources were writing with secrecy in mind.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099531836</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Paul Bushkovitch
|title=A Concise History of Russia
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Russia's recent history, especially since the end of the Cold War, has been so full of new developments that there is probably little if any limit to the number of fresh histories the market can absorb. This most recent, from a Professor of History at Yale University, take a little over 450 pages to tell the story from the earliest days of Kiev Rus, the territory which was to become the ancestor of the present nation state around the 10th century AD, to Vladimir Putin's assumption of office as President in 2000.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0521543231</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Chil Rajchman
|title=Treblinka: A Survivor's Memory
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=Here comes yet another book about the Holocaust, and yet another with more than enough damning indictment of those events and their perpetrators, with more than enough horrific reportage to make your blood run cold, and with more than enough distinguishing features to make it a necessary purchase. The latter is partly down to where it came from - while Dachau started out as a camp for political prisoners, and Auschwitz I was a work camp based round barrack blocks that you can squint at and see a bad private school, this is coming from Treblinka, which was constructed purely and simply to kill. It has rightly been called a 'conveyer-belt executioner's block'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849163995</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Johanna Adorjan
|title=An Exclusive Love
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary=This moving memoir tells of the double suicide of both István (a Hungarian-Jewish form of Stephen) and his wife Vera one Sunday morning in October. The story is told by their granddaughter, Joanna Adorján and tells of her close fondness for them both but in particular with Vera, with whom the author shares many characteristics. The story begins with the systematic persecution of such Hungarian Jews in Budapest under the Nazi occupation and describes their perilous flight to Denmark after the Soviet occupation of Hungary in 1956. It ends with the police reports of the duty officer dated 15.10.91 with the discovery of their bodies in their bungalow in the Charlottenlund, a town of the Capital Region of Denmark. Entry is gained by a local locksmith who charged 297.02 kroner. It is the charm and lyricism with which this tale is related which makes this fateful, haunting and profoundly moving story about identity both sad and memorable.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099552671</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=David Loades
|title=The Tudors: History of a Dynasty
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=
For several years David Loades has written and published extensively about the Tudors, individually and collectively, from almost every angle possible. This title is not a chronological biography or history of the five monarchs whose reigns gave their name to the era. As he and his publisher make clear in the preface, it is rather a study of Tudor policies.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1441136908</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Francesca Beauman
|title=Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Advertisement
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary=You might think the Lonely Hearts ad a trivial matter. You might think it should appear in lower case and not be capitalised, but you'd be in disagreement with Ms Beauman, who gives a big L and a big H to it every time she writes of it in her survey of its history. What's more, she gets to write about a lot more than just the contents of the adverts in this brilliant book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009951334X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Roman Krznaric
|title=The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live
|rating=5
|genre=History
|summary='How should we live?' asks author Roman Krznaric. To answer this ancient question, he looks to history. 'I believe that the future of the art of living can be found by gazing into the past', he says. Creating a book which is as full of curiosities as a Renaissance 'Wunderkammer', he has a stab at the big questions: love, belief, money, family, death. The result is a pot-pourri of delights which left this particular reader stimulated and invigorated.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846683939</amazonuk>
}}